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SteamOS vs. Windows 8.1 NVIDIA Performance

Phoronix: SteamOS vs. Windows 8.1 NVIDIA Performance

For those NVIDIA gaming customers running Microsoft Windows 8.1 that have been thinking about giving Valve's SteamOS Linux-based gaming platform a try, here are some early benchmarks of the SteamOS 1.0 beta that compare the performance to Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro x64 on multiple NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

I know you've said that it's near impossible for you to benchmark real commercial games (like Half Life 2), but to be honest, I don't care about any of the Open Source game benchmarks you keep posting. I don't play them and never will (maybe I speak for several people.).
The only games (and therefore, benchmarks) I care about, are real commercial games: Half Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Metro Last Light etc..

I know you've said that it's near impossible for you to benchmark real commercial games (like Half Life 2), but to be honest, I don't care about any of the Open Source game benchmarks you keep posting. I don't play them and never will (maybe I speak for several people.).
The only games (and therefore, benchmarks) I care about, are real commercial games: Half Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Metro Last Light etc..

I know you've said that it's near impossible for you to benchmark real commercial games (like Half Life 2), but to be honest, I don't care about any of the Open Source game benchmarks you keep posting. I don't play them and never will (maybe I speak for several people.).
The only games (and therefore, benchmarks) I care about, are real commercial games: Half Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Metro Last Light etc..

Sadly good benchmark require reproducible test and commercial game on Linux side are lacking benchmark tool currently.

Phoronix does not benchmark <insert game here> because it does not have a benchmark mode for linux. Phoronix does benchmark unigine, which is a modern game engine. So improvements in unigine's performance would mean improvements in Metro: last light, TF2, etc.

The older open source games use more basic graphical features, so improvements in them will also translate to performance improvements. Until the open source drivers catch up performance wise with these older games, there is plenty of value benchmarking them. There are plenty of indie games that are on linux or a coming that won't be much more complicated graphically than these open source engines, so knowing how well the hardware can handle them is important.

If you want things to change. Please kindly ask game developers to create a cross-platform benchmark of their game engine that can be launched from the command line.

I think these results were largely expected. Two questions though:
* Was the Windows test done using DirectX or OpenGL?
* Is there any difference in performance other than framerate? How long does it take to load the test for example.

If you want things to change. Please kindly ask game developers to create a cross-platform benchmark of their game engine that can be launched from the command line.

Windows games has not such benchmarks too. All we need is a simple program controlling X command and recording FPS-number. If you can record and playback X input (keyboard, mouse etc.) devices, you can create a reproducible benchmark. Time to fork xnee...

Sadly good benchmark require reproducible test and commercial game on Linux side are lacking benchmark tool currently.

All Valve's games on Source engine have easy tools for recording/playing replays of games, and this feature is working cross-platform (haven't tested, but I can't see any reason for this, AFAIK i.e. Dota 2 for Linux difference is just only translating DX calls to OpenGL).